Electronic documents play an increasing role in our lives. Indeed nowadays many, if not most, documents are created electronically; and we take it for granted that electronic documents are easier to store, retrieve, copy, print, update and distribute than paper documents.
For desk-bound, document-intensive workers this may indeed be the situation, but for people whose jobs require them to be more mobile, existing technology does not greatly assist in such tasks. For a mobile worker, electronic documents are significantly less convenient to locate, read and distribute, and yet these activities appear to be the dominant document-intensive activities outside the office. When away from his office or workstation, perhaps at a meeting, a worker is rarely able to access all or most of his electronic documents, and he will often resort to carrying a bulky set of paper documents as a precaution, even though they may not in fact be needed for the meeting.
There are many situations in which a paper document is clearly the most effective medium for exchanging information. Sometimes the intended recipient has no immediate need for the information, but they see a potential need for it in the future. In this situation it seems preferable to exchange the document electronically. Nevertheless they are forced to carry the document back to their office or home, perhaps having first stopped off at a copier or printer to obtain it, and contribute to their stack of paper documents.
Although many documents are created electronically, a relatively small proportion of those documents are distributed electronically because electronic distribution is often beset with difficulties. For example, if a person, the sender, wants to give an electronic document to someone they are currently talking to, the recipient, the sender must break off the conversation, go to a workstation, search for the desired document, find out the recipient's electronic address, check how best to encode the data for the recipient's machine; and then transfer the document. Compared with simply handing over a paper document this process is disruptive, time-consuming and unreliable. Furthermore, rarely can the sender or the recipient immediately confirm that the document has been successfully transferred between them. To do so requires the recipient to go to his workstation, search for the document and explicitly acknowledge to the sender that the document was received.
Another problem arises even when a person decides to hand over a paper copy to the recipient. If he doesn't have a paper copy to hand, to avoid disruption he will often promise to print the document later and hand it over after the meeting has concluded, a task he may forget to perform. If it is decided to print out the document there and then, the person must break off from the conversation, find the electronic document, find a printer that isn't in use, send the document to the printer, and then remember to go and pick it up when printing is complete. However, people often forget to pick up their output; and if a confidential document has been printed on a network printer, the sender must ensure that he is on hand to collect it immediately.
A further problem exists for workers who are unable to gain access to their workstation or network: it is now commonplace for members of a committee to travel long distances to attend important meetings. For example, standards committees convene experts from all over the world; and participants try to arrive prepared with all the information they might need to present to their colleagues, respond to questions, or take decisions. Often the committee meets at one of several different locations each time: the European Parliament, for example, regularly moves between Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. It may be impossible for the attendees to anticipate the document needs, or they may not be able to afford to carry printed versions of everything. When a missing document is needed urgently, the situation can be remedied by a telephone call back to the office to someone who has access to the electronic document and can print it out or fax it to the meeting. At best this disrupts the flow of the meeting, and there is a risk that the document will not be received at all.
It is known to use infrared (IR) communication to transfer electronic documents from one portable computer to another during a meeting--e.g. the Apple.RTM. Newton. However, compared with existing electronic communications devices, the (IR) data transfer rate between such machines is very slow: to beam a simple electronic document from one to another, users may need to stand within a few feet of each other and point the IR transmitters of their machines at each other for several minutes.
A further problem is that it is not possible to store large numbers of electronic documents on a portable, hand-held or wristwatch computer. This is the case with documents in, e.g., PostScript, but may be an even greater problem with scanned (bitmapped) documents.